---
title: "Allopoiesis"
description: "Bratton's general definition of artificialization."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/allopoiesis"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/allopoiesis"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Allopoiesis

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/allopoiesis), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Bratton's general definition of artificialization. Life is (incompletely) defined by *autopoiesis* — internalizing the environment to replicate the system; *allopoiesis*, which "probably emerges much later," is a system's capacity to produce something extrinsic to itself so as to capture more energy, information and matter in the service of autopoiesis. "In the most general sense, allopoiesis is what we mean by artificialization" (the journal scrape misprints this as "autopoiesis"; the caption transcript has it right). It is the middle rung of the scaffold chain chemistry → life → allopoiesis → complex intelligence → symbolic language → AI, which makes AI "the artificialization of artificialization." Agüera y Arcas does not use the pair; his equivalent is prediction-and-influence.

## Appears in

- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._